Listening Space – Textiles in Dialogue with Atmospheric Data

Listening Space is a collaborative artistic research project by Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Briot, initiated in April 2019 during eTextile Spring Break in Wassaic, New York.

The project explores transmission ecologies as a means of perceiving the surrounding environment beyond human sensory abilities. It investigates the invisible electromagnetic signals that saturate the atmosphere, considering satellite transmissions both as raw material for artistic expression and as a way of understanding and reimagining the systems through which we observe the Earth.

Driven by previous explorations into non-verbal communication systems, the artists began experimenting with radio-frequency detection while considering the human body as an interface for sensing the invisible universe that surrounds us. Using wearable, hand-crafted textile and lace antennas together with software-defined radios, Listening Space intercepts transmissions from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) weather satellites as they orbit overhead. Textile becomes both a receiving medium and a material through which atmospheric data can be interpreted and embodied.

The act of reception is inherently performative. Satellite transmissions can only be intercepted within specific temporal and spatial windows, at a rhythm dictated by their orbit. The body becomes part of the receiving apparatus: movement, gesture, orientation, and location influence the process of listening to signals travelling between satellites and Earth.

These intercepted transmissions are approached simultaneously as environmental data, sonic material, and a form of citizen science. During performances, the artists capture the satellites’ audio transmissions through their wearable textile antennas and software-defined radios. The signals are then decoded into satellite images of the Earth’s atmosphere, revealing weather systems and environmental events. These images become the basis for knitted textile works, creating a physical archive of an otherwise ephemeral process of detection, reception, and decoding.

Central to Listening Space are knitted works the artists call Satellite Ikats. Their imagery derives directly from the NOAA satellite transmissions intercepted by the artists and subsequently decoded. Translated into knitted surfaces, the satellite images appear as dense mappings of atmospheric phenomena and weather systems. Produced using both hacked domestic knitting machines and digitally controlled knitting machines, these works transform intercepted atmospheric data into material artifacts. Knitting thus becomes a form of memory storage: a way of materializing and preserving dialogues intercepted between Earth and its satellites.

Listening Space further explores the radio spectrum as a vital ecology of the Anthropocene. This invisible infrastructure enables much of contemporary life, from environmental monitoring and global telecommunications to radio astronomy, while remaining largely imperceptible to our natural senses. By translating electromagnetic energies into sound, image, gesture, and tactile fibers, the project also raises questions about the technologies and forms of access through which we are able to “listen” to, observe, and decode the planet.

Through this process, Listening Space seeks to extend the human capacity to sense invisible fields of transmission and to reconsider the technologies through which planetary environments are observed, transmitted, decoded, and remembered.

Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Briot have been collaborating on Listening Space since 2019. Their work has been recognized with the Bergstrom Award for Art and Science (2020) and has been exhibited and performed globally, including at LABoral (Spain), Onassis Stegi (Greece), Jacob Lawrence Gallery (Seattle), ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computers) (UK), and ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Arts) (Canada).